Burma

Burma held landmark by-elections April 1 for 45 seats in its 664-member parliament. The polls, heralded as yet another sign of the country’s reemergence from global isolation, may prompt the U.S. and E.U. to lift sanctions in place since the mid-1990s. Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi—running for political office for the first time since spending 15 years under house arrest—won by a landslide and will now take her place in the national parliament (which still reserves a quarter of seats for the armed forces under Burma’s evolving hybrid civilian-military government system). Meanwhile Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party claimed at least 43 seats in the first vote it has contested since the military regime ignored its overwhelming triumph in the 1990 general elections.